The Feast
by ElliotJA
Summary: A call for help sends David Banner into a lonely house, where he finds a horror he never could have imagined existed. Takes place in the continuity of the old Hulk TV show with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno.


"Please, help me!" David Banner, lost in thought as he walked slowly along the quiet, lonely Massachusetts road surrounded by deep woodland, looked up at the sound of the voice. He had not even noticed the large two-story house among the trees on the other side of the road, and now he not only saw it, but the man running across from it to him.

"What's the problem?" Banner asked.

The man stopped in front of him, eyes wide with worry and breathing hard. He was slender and pale, middle-aged, hair greying slightly, and dressed in a simple white shirt and dark pants. "You have to help me," he gasped. "My wife, she...she was in the front room and a bookcase fell on her! She's stuck underneath it, and I can't get her out! Please help!"

Banner hesitated a second, then his natural doctor's instinct to help others in need kicked in, and he responded "Okay, take me to her!" He followed the man as they ran across the road to the house together.

"She's just through here," the man said as he held open a door inside the house. Banner ran inside - and stopped in confusion, as he saw it was unoccupied and everything appeared to be normal.

"I don't understand, there's no one - " he said, before a blindingly sharp pain erupted from a heavy blow to the back of his head, and he collapsed limply to the floor, consciousness winking out into blackness.

OOOOOOOO

It was to a distant rumbling which Banner shortly recognized as thunder that he painfully awoke to. Trying to block out the dull throbbing in his skull, he slowly opened his eyes. He appeared to be in a darkened room in a house. On his left was a wide window through which he could just make out a road beside a forest, and a dark sky which was briefly lit by a flash of lightning. Turning his head to the right, Banner saw a fire burning steadily underneath a mantelpiece. Thick ropes bound him to the chair in which he was seated.

Situated nearby was a large plush armchair next to a small, round mahogany table. Banner found his gaze drawn to the books on the table; they were thick and bound in what looked to be very old leather. As he squinted, he could read the titles on the spines: _Necronomicon_ , _De Vermiis Mysteriis_ , _The Book of Hidden Things_. Looking at them, Banner felt unusually disturbed, even though he was quite sure he had never heard those titles before in his life.

Then he heard a voice, emanating from somewhere beyond the door directly in front of him. The voice was very low and speaking a strange language totally unknown to Banner: " _Ia_ , _Ia_ , _Cthulhu fhtagn_..." the voice kept croaking like a mantra. Then there was another sound: The clumping of shoes on bare wooden steps, and then on the floor, getting closer.

As he listened, Banner's blurred memories suddenly became crystal clear; he remembered how he had come to be in this place and, fighting the rising panic, began straining against the ropes encircling him. He had to get away, before someone got hurt, before he got _angry_...

The man who had tricked him inside the house appeared in the doorway then, and Banner went rigid as he looked at his face, his eyes that seemed almost to glow with a mad, inhuman light. "You're awake," his host said, smiling. "Oh, well. Makes little difference to me."

Thinking very carefully, Banner said "Sir, I don't know who you are or what this is all about, but please believe me when I tell you that if you don't let me go now, you're placing yourself in serious danger."

"Oh, I only wish I could, my friend," the man replied, slowly walking into the room and stopping a few feet from where Banner was tied. He glanced out of the window as spots of rain pattered against the glass. "I really must apologize for lying to you. There's no one else around for some miles, and...well, what with the hunger...I was afraid I'd have to go all the way to Arkham again, and that could easily prove hazardous to me."

 _Hunger?_ Banner thought. _What's going on here?_ "What do you want with me?" he demanded.

The man was still looking out of the window as he spoke. "I thought I was fully prepared at first, when I used the Dho-Hna formula, and made it to the inner city at the magnetic poles. I had some idea of what I would find there...but not enough! You couldn't even begin to imagine that place, or what it breeds! What I found there changed me more than I realized." He looked directly at Banner then. "I encountered something that infected me, you see, though I didn't know it at first. It wasn't until I made it back home that the first...signs appeared, and the hunger began. I brought it back to our world. It's a part of me now, and it needs to feed...so it can grow stronger!" As he stood there, his eyes bulging, he started that strange, gurgling chant again: " _Ia_ , _Ia_ , _Cthulhu fhtagn_... _Ia_ , _Shub-Niggurath_... _Ia_ , _Yog-Sothoth_..."

Fear was mounting in Banner now, and it only got worse as he watched what happened next: His captor's face and body seemed to be obscured by a black-and-red moving substance. From where his face had been blossomed a wide hole of hideous crimson light like a dying star, accompanied by a rattling hiss - a mouth. All reason fled at that moment; Banner screamed in sheer horror and wildly thrashed against his bonds, harder and harder as the terror and rage grew and grew. His eyes turned an eerie greenish white and - perhaps mercifully - he knew no more.

His body now nightmarishly distorted, what had been the owner of the house observed Banner's clothes stretch and tear as his muscles suddenly grew massive in size, and his skin turned a bright green. In the space of a moment, David Banner had gone, and in his place was his monstrous other self - the Hulk. Snarling with rage, the Hulk flexed his muscles and easily snapped the ropes holding him in a heartbeat. Now standing at full height and glaring at his enemy, he let out a roar that shook the whole house and rivalled the thunder outside.

Making a grotesque chittering like something from a lunatic's darkest nightmare, the thing that had brought Banner here rushed towards its prey, only to be halted by the Hulk seizing its black, snakey limbs in his powerful hands. Looking into that demonic maw and feeling its unearthly flesh, the Hulk's animalistic brain was overcome by a revulsion and hatred stronger than anything he had ever felt before. Bellowing, he spun and hurled his inhuman opponent straight into the blazing fireplace. Its body lit aflame, the foul creature gave a shrill screech of agony, a sound never meant to be heard on Earth, and in its frenzied thrashing, quickly set fire to the rug.

Liking not the situation, the Hulk turned with a growl and smashed the window and wall into shards of glass and brick, stepping outside into the storm. As he ran across the rain-swept road and plunged into the shelter of the forest, the shrieking of the thing in the house continued, and black smoke was already billowing out of the destroyed window.


End file.
